It all began in June 2005 when Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board proposing a third alternative to the teaching of evolution and intelligent design in schools. Bobby is a prophet of sorts, the spiritual leader of a growing, world-wide group of followers who worship the teachings of The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). The FSM appeared to Bobby as a giant ball of spaghetti, with meatballs for eyes, and touched Bobby with “His noodly appendage” – resulting in the revelation that the FSM is the real creator of the universe. The FSM faithful look to Bobby as their prophet and spiritual leader. Shortly after Bobby’s revelation a website (www.flyingspaghettimonster.org) came into existence to promote the word. Then came the articles, which were worldwide: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), Die Welt (Germany), Surprise (Austria), and many others chimed in to report the existence of the FSM. Bobby received letters of support from academics and Kansas School Board members alike – not to mention a couple million hits per day on the website – and it was all-too-clear that there needed to be a book to lay out FSM *ure, rites and observances, proofs, and answers to the Big Questions. This is that book.

Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys was a global phenomenon. The first book in a generation to look at boys' specific needs, parents loved its clarity and warm insights into their sons' inner world. But today, things have changed. It's girls that are in trouble. There has been a sudden and universal deterioration in girls' mental health, starting in primary school and devastating the teen years. Steve Biddulph's Raising Girls is both a guidebook and a call-to-arms for parents. The five key stages of girlhood are laid out so that you know exactly what matters at which age, and how to build strength and connectedness into your daughter from infancy onwards. Raising Girls is both fierce and tender in its mission to help girls more at every age. It's a book for parents who love their daughters deeply, whether they are newborns, teenagers, young women - or anywhere in between. Feeling secure, becoming an explorer, getting along with others, finding her soul, and becoming a woman - at last, there is a clear map of girls' minds that accepts no limitations, narrow roles or selling-out of your daughter's potential or uniqueness. All the hazards are signposted - bullying, eating disorders, body image and depression, social media harms and helps - as are concrete and simple measures for both mums and dads to help prevent their daughters from becoming victims. Parenthood is restored to an exciting journey, not one worry after another, as it's so often portrayed. Steve talks to the world's leading voices on girls' needs and makes their ideas clear and simple, adding his own humour and experience through stories that you will never forget. Even the illustrations, by Kimio Kubo, provide unique and moving glimpses into the inner lives of girls. Along with his fellow psychologists worldwide, Steve is angry at the exploitation and harm being done to girls today. With Raising Girls he strives to spark a movement to end the trashing of girlhood; equipping parents to deal with the modern wor

Magician, available in ebook for the first time, is a masterwork of magic and adventure. The whole of the magnificent Riftwar Cycle, by bestselling author Raymond E. Feist, is now available in ebook

One hundred classic stories from the celebrated author of Fahrenheit 451. In this, the first volume of Ray Bradbury's short stories, some of the author's finest works are published together, among them ‘Homecoming’, ‘Veldt’, ‘A Sound of Thunder’ and ‘The Long Rain’. Join an ill-fated crew of astronauts pushed to the brink of insanity by the incessant and highly corrosive rain on Venus, a high-tech virtual reality playroom that comes to life with terrible consequences, and a safari company offering tours for the wealthy back in time to the prehistoric era to stalk and kill dinosaurs, resulting in the present they return to being irrevocably altered. This collection is a rare treasure trove of wonder; as apprehensive about technology and the fate of humanity as it is elegiaic of its irrepressible progress. Each story presents an enlightening and poetic facet of Bradbury’s writing, every one as relevant now as when it was first written.

Design and implement successful private clouds with OpenStack About This Book Explore the various design choices available for cloud architects within an OpenStack deployment Craft an OpenStack architecture and deployment pipeline to meet the unique needs of your organization Create a product roadmap for Infrastructure as a Service in your organization using this hands-on guide Who This Book Is For This book is written especially for those who will design OpenStack clouds and lead their implementation. These people are typically cloud architects, but may also be in product management, systems engineering, or enterprise architecture. What You Will Learn Familiarize yourself with the components of OpenStack Build an increasingly complex OpenStack lab deployment Write compelling documentation for the architecture teams within your organization Apply Agile configuration management techniques to deploy OpenStack Integrate OpenStack with your organization's identity management, provisioning, and billing systems Configure a robust virtual environment for users to interact with Use enterprise security guidelines for your OpenStack deployment Create a product roadmap that delivers functionality quickly to the users of your platform In Detail Over the last five years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders such as Red Hat have led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Because of its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill-set to design and implement it. This guide leads you through each of the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. At each point, we offer you advice based on the experience we've gained from designing and leading successful OpenStack projects in a wide range of industries. Each chapter also includes lab material that gives you a chance to install and configure the technologies used to build production-quality OpenStack clouds. Most importantly, we focus on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout. Style and approach This is practical, hands-on guide to implementing OpenStack clouds, where each topic is illustrated with real-world examples and then the technical points are proven in the lab.

Build a tower defense game and earn delectable C# treats by baking cupcakes and fighting fearsome sweet-toothed pandas About This Book Build a complete and exciting 2D Tower Defense game from scratch. Understand and learn to perform each phase of the game development pipeline Homework and exercises to improve your skills and take them to the next level Who This Book Is For If you are looking forward to get started with 2D game development, either if you are a newcomer to this world, or you came from 3D games or other game engines, this book is for you. Although there are many references to other resources throughout the book, it is assumed that you have a general understanding of C# and its syntax and structure. What You Will Learn Import and set up assets for 2D game development Design and implement dynamic and responsive User Interfaces Create and handle complex animation systems Unlock all the potentiality of the physics engine Implement Artificial Intelligence algorithms to give intelligence to your NPCs Script gameplay and overall bring your ideas to life In Detail Want to get started in the world of 2D game development with UnityThis book will take your hand and guide you through this amazing journey to let you know exactly what you need to build the games you want to build, without sacrificing quality. You will build a solid understanding of Unity 5.x, by focusing with the embedded tools to develop 2D games. In learning about these, along with accurate explanations and practical examples, you will design, develop, learn how to market and publish a delectable Tower Defense game about cupcakes versus pandas. Each chapter in this book is structured to give you a full understanding on a specific aspect of the workflow pipeline. Each of these aspects are essential for developing games in Unity. In a step-by-step approach, you will learn about each of the following phases: Game Design, Asset Importing, Scripting, User Interfaces, Animations, Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Gameplay Programming, Polishing and Improving, Marketing, Publishing and much more. This book provides you with exercises and homework at the end of each chapter so that you can level up your skills as a Unity game developer. In addition, each of these parts are centered on a common point of discussion with other learners just like you. Therefore, by sharing your ideas with other people you will not only develop your skills but you will also build a network. Style and approach This is a fun step-by-step approach in the whole pipeline of 2D game development in Unity, which is explained in a conversational and easy-to-follow style. Each topic is explained sequentially, allowing you to experience both basics and advanced features of Unity. By doing this, the book is able to provide you with a solid grasp on each of the topics. In this way, by engaging with the book’s content, exploring the additional references to further readings and completing the homework sections, you are able to challenge yourself and apply what you know in a variety of ways. Once you have finished reading this book, you will be well on your way to developing games from start to finish!

Exploit the visualization capabilities of Kibana and build powerful interactive dashboards About This Book Introduction to data-driven architecture and the Elastic stack Build effective dashboards for data visualization and explore datasets with Elastic Graph A comprehensive guide to learning scalable data visualization techniques in Kibana Who This Book Is For If you are a developer, data visualization engineer, or data scientist who wants to get the best of data visualization at scale then this book is perfect for you. A basic understanding of Elasticsearch and Logstash is required to make the best use of this book. What You Will Learn How to create visualizations in Kibana Ingest log data, structure an Elasticsearch cluster, and create visualization assets in Kibana Embed Kibana visualization on web pages Scaffold, develop, and deploy new Kibana & Timelion customizations Build a metrics dashboard in Timelion based on time series data Use the Graph plugin visualization feature and leverage a graph query Create, implement, package, and deploy a new custom plugin Use Prelert to solve anomaly detection challenges In Detail Kibana is an open source data visualization platform that allows you to interact with your data through stunning, powerful graphics. Its simple, browser-based interface enables you to quickly create and share dynamic dashboards that display changes to Elasticsearch queries in real time. In this book, you’ll learn how to use the Elastic stack on top of a data architecture to visualize data in real time. All data architectures have different requirements and expectations when it comes to visualizing the data, whether it’s logging analytics, metrics, business analytics, graph analytics, or scaling them as per your business requirements. This book will help you master Elastic visualization tools and adapt them to the requirements of your project. You will start by learning how to use the basic visualization features of Kibana 5. Then you will be shown how to implement a pure metric analytics architecture and visualize it using Timelion, a very recent and trendy feature of the Elastic stack. You will learn how to correlate data using the brand-new Graph visualization and build relationships between documents. Finally, you will be familiarized with the setup of a Kibana development environment so that you can build a custom Kibana plugin. By the end of this book you will have all the information needed to take your Elastic stack skills to a new level of data visualization. Style and approach This book takes a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to working with the visualization aspects of the Elastic stack. Every concept is presented in a very easy-to-follow manner that shows you both the logic and method of implementation. Real world cases are referenced to highlight how each of the key concepts can be put to practical use.

Build, implement and scale distributed deep learning models for large-scale datasets About This Book Get to grips with the deep learning concepts and set up Hadoop to put them to use Implement and parallelize deep learning models on Hadoop’s YARN framework A comprehensive tutorial to distributed deep learning with Hadoop Who This Book Is For If you are a data scientist who wants to learn how to perform deep learning on Hadoop, this is the book for you. Knowledge of the basic machine learning concepts and some understanding of Hadoop is required to make the best use of this book. What You Will Learn Explore Deep Learning and various models associated with it Understand the challenges of implementing distributed deep learning with Hadoop and how to overcome it Implement Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with deeplearning4j Delve into the implementation of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) Understand the mathematical explanation for implementing Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) Get hands on practice of deep learning and their implementation with Hadoop. In Detail This book will teach you how to deploy large-scale dataset in deep neural networks with Hadoop for optimal performance. Starting with understanding what deep learning is, and what the various models associated with deep neural networks are, this book will then show you how to set up the Hadoop environment for deep learning. In this book, you will also learn how to overcome the challenges that you face while implementing distributed deep learning with large-scale unstructured datasets. The book will also show you how you can implement and parallelize the widely used deep learning models such as Deep Belief Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, Restricted Boltzmann Machines and autoencoder using the popular deep learning library deeplearning4j. Get in-depth mathematical explanations and visual representations to help you understand the design and implementations of Recurrent Neural network and Denoising AutoEncoders with deeplearning4j. To give you a more practical perspective, the book will also teach you the implementation of large-scale video processing, image processing and natural language processing on Hadoop. By the end of this book, you will know how to deploy various deep neural networks in distributed systems using Hadoop. Style and approach This book takes a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to implement efficient deep learning models on Hadoop. It starts from the basics and builds the readers’ knowledge as they strengthen their understanding of the concepts. Practical examples are included in every step of the way to supplement the theory.

The classic bestseller – over a million copies sold worldwide High fashion, low cunning – and the boss from hell When Andrea first sets foot in the plush Manhattan offices of Runway she knows nothing. She's never heard of the world's most fashionable magazine, or its feared and fawned-over editor, Miranda Priestly – her new boss. A year later, she knows altogether too much: That it's a sacking offence to wear anything lower than a three-inch heel to work. That you can charge cars, manicures, anything at all to the Runway account, but you must never, ever, leave your desk, or let Miranda's coffee get cold. And that at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, when your boyfriend's dumping you because you're always at work, if Miranda phones, you jump. But this is Andrea’s big break – it's going to be worth it in the end. Isn't it?

15-20% of children are Highly Sensitive – and they are often labelled shy, introverted, fussy or faddy. The real story is very different though and this intelligent, practical book helps parents know what to do, when to back off, and how to ensure their child is given the right sort of treatment at school. This book is the follow up to the author’s internationally best-selling personal development guide The Highly Sensitive Person. It is the first and only book for parents of highly sensitive children. It provides parents with insights and information so they can understand High Sensitivity, and help their highly sensitive child thrive in the world. It is important for these children to be understood so they can be helped to avoid the common traps of shyness and withdrawal that many highly sensitive fall into as they develop. Contains questionnaire for parents to find out if their child has the traits common in highly sensitive children. Discusses HSC’s at different ages – infant, toddler, school-age and adolescent.…

A sweeping saga set around the aristocratic Ingham family of Cavendon Hall and the Swanns who serve them, set on the eve of World War 1.

As a favour to an old friend, Hercule Poirot finds himself at a summer fete in Devon, taking part not in a Treasure Hunt, but a Murder Hunt, in this never-before-published novella version of Dead Man’s Folly. Now released for the first time in print in this illustrated collector’s edition. Sir George and Lady Stubbs, the hosts of a village fête, hit upon the novel idea of staging a mock murder mystery. In good faith, Ariadne Oliver, the well known crime writer, agrees to organise their murder hunt. But at the last minute Ariadne calls her friend Hercule Poirot for his expert assistance. Instinctively, she senses that something sinister is about to happen… In 1954, Agatha Christie wrote this novella with the intention of donating the proceeds to a fund set up to buy stained glass windows for her local church at Churston Ferrers, and she filled the story with references to local places, including her own home of Greenway. But having completed it, she decided instead to expand the story into a full-length novel, Dead Man’s Folly, which was published two years later, and donated a Miss Marple story (Greenshaw’s Folly) to the church fund instead. Unseen for sixty years, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly is finally published in this collector’s hardback edition. The book includes a jacket painting, illustrations and exclusive introduction by Tom Adams, Agatha Christie’s most famous cover artist, who is back illustrating Agatha Christie for the first time in more than 30 years.

The third consecutive No.1 bestselling crime novel from the author of the DI Logan McRae series and Birthdays for the Dead. Sticks and stones may break your bones… The first body is chained to a stake: strangled, and stabbed, with a burning tyre around its neck. But is this a gangland execution or something much darker? Someone’s leaving little knots of bones on DI Logan McRae’s doorstep, but he’s got bigger concerns. Rival drug gangs are fighting over product and territory; two teenage lovers are missing; someone’s crippling Asian immigrants; and Logan’s been lumbered with an ambitious new Detective Sergeant and gained the unwelcome attention of the local crime boss. When another body turns up, the similarities between these murders and the plot of a bestselling novel seem like more than just a coincidence. And perhaps those little knots of bones are more important than they look…

Previously adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola starring Kirsten Dunst, this is the story of the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood. The boys that once loved them from afar are now grown men, determined to understand a tragedy that has always defied explanation. For still, the question remains – why did all five of the Lisbon girls take their own lives? This hypnotic and unforgettable novel treats adolescent love and death with haunting sensitivity and dark humour, and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.

Laughs, love, office life.And a little touch of magic … From the bestselling author of LOOKING FOR ANDREW MCCARTHY and AMANDA'S WEDDING.

The third novel by the Sunday times bestselling author of Amanda’s Wedding

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, ‘The Hours’ is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of ‘Mrs Dalloway’. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women.

Another incredible novel from the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Alchemist.

The 400 million copy worldwide bestseller Dean Koontz is at his very best in this critically-acclaimed page-turner – soon to be a major motion picture. Find out why Odd Thomas is the master storyteller’s most-loved creation. Odd by name, a hero by nature. He’s Odd. Odd Thomas, to be precise. Genius fry-cook at the Pico Mundo grill; boyfriend to the gorgeous Stormy Llewellyn – and possibly the only person with a chance of stopping one of the worst crimes in the bloody history of murder… Something evil has come to the desert town that Odd and Stormy call home. It comes in the form of a mysterious man with a macabre appetite, a filing cabinet full of information on the world’s worst killers, and strange, hyena-like shadows following him wherever he goes. Odd is worried. He knows things, sees things – about the living, the dead and the soon to be dead. Things that he has to act on. Now he’s terrified for Stormy, himself and Pico Mundo. Because he knows that on Wednesday August 15, a savage, blood-soaked whirlwind of violence and murder will devastate the town. Today is August 14. And Odd is far from sure he can stop the coming storm…

In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.

What happens when the one that got away comes back? Find out in this sparkling comedy from #1 bestseller, Mhairi McFarlane. ‘Think of the great duos of history. We're just like them.’ ‘You mean like Kylie and Jason? Torvill and Dean? Sonny and Cher?’ ‘I think you’ve missed the point, Rachel.’ Rachel and Ben. Ben and Rachel. It was them against the world. Until it all fell apart. It’s been a decade since they last spoke, but when Rachel bumps into Ben one rainy day, the years melt away. They’d been partners in crime and the best of friends. But life has moved on: Ben is married. Rachel is not. Yet in that split second, Rachel feels the old friendship return. And along with it, the broken heart she’s never been able to mend. Hilarious, heartbreaking and everything in between, you’ll be hooked from their first ‘hello’.